Liana Maeby’s accomplished debut novel, South On Highland, is a meditation on the addiction memoir. The book was initially intended to gently mock a genre the New York-born but Los Angeles-raised author felt a deep affinity with. However, during the process of writing, Maeby soon found that the universal truths were more compelling, regardless of the comedy, tragedy, fact and fiction that conveyed them. Thus, the resulting book — which is helpfully subtitled “A Novel” for those who may be confused — very much reads like an autobiography, even though it isn’t, exactly, precisely, or at all really.
Like the novel’s protagonist Leila Massey, Maeby is an impossibly cool, witty young writer in Hollywood, with more than a dabble of experience with a variety of illicit substances. However, unlike her fictional character, Maeby’s life hasn’t imploded spectacularly after raiding a big shot executive producer’s bathroom cabinet during a potentially career-making Beverly Hills Passover soiree. But, in other respects, the novel does draw directly on Maeby’s experience in an entertainment capital that demands youth and experience — two qualities that are often considered to be mutually exclusive. As such, South On Highland offers brutal commentary on the sordid underbelly of a highly hypocritical industry that for the most part spits out saccharin entertainment for the masses.
Having read the fast-living page-turner in under two days, we hit Maeby up on Skype to talk sex, drugs and tattoos, and to separate the facts from her exceedingly excellent work of fiction.
Nicole Powers: So, congrats on the book.
Liana Maeby: Thank you so much. It’s been a really exciting couple weeks.
NP: I bet. It’s your first — you never forget your first, right?
LM: I don’t think so. [laughs] Pretty sure this will be with me forever.
NP: You set out to write an addiction parody novel, which implies that you’ve read a lot of real odes to the joys and misery of addiction. What works inspired you? What did you read that you wanted to parody?
LM: Initially I did set out wanting to write something that was just a satire of the addiction memoir genre, because I really realized that I just love those books and I think they’re so fascinating and so cool. Permanent Midnight for me was definitely the biggest influence, in terms of just the writing of it and the style of it. And then, I think I was really also drawn in by the whole James Frey story. I think that definitely inspired it. Not in terms of the writing of the book, as much as just the idea that, you know, obviously you should never falsely represent yourself. Okay, that makes sense. But why are we so much more drawn into these stories if we believe that they’re true? That was something that I definitely wanted to play around with. So, it started off as straight satire of that, and then, very quickly into the writing of it, I realized that that just wasn’t as interesting or sustainable as really just novelizing it, so that’s what I ended up doing.
NP: You’ve actually confused many reviewers, because the book is not quite fiction but it’s not quite non-fiction either.
LM: Exactly. And the funny thing is, that was exactly my point; I wanted there to be this question mark about what was real and what wasn’t. But now that’s actually happening, I’m annoyed by it. So, that’s kind of an odd little turn of events. But yeah… I wanted to take a kernel of a character that was me, and take a lot of real emotions and some real facts, and then mostly just take it all the way to its logical extreme. In some ways, I’m like, oh it’s cool that people think it’s real. That obviously the writing of it is somewhat believable. But also I’m just like, oh, you guys, it says it’s a novel on the cover… My mother is always telling people that it’s fiction, which is very funny.
NP: Well, also, it’s funny because you started off with the intention of parody and then you fictionalized it, but in many ways it does read more like reality — which is actually a damning indictment of the current state of Hollywood. What are your thoughts about Hollywood’s double standard when it comes to drugs?
LM: Well, yeah, I mean it’s interesting right? Because, for me, drugs are such a big part of this larger currency of life experience. And basically we have a scenario where Hollywood expects everyone to have this wealth of experience to draw from, but also to be impossibly young at the same time. It’s this paradox that’s impossible to reach. I think especially as a young person, especially as a young woman, trying to write, there’s this insane expectation that you’re going to know everything and have all this life experience to be able to trade on, and then also be eternally vampirically young…
I remember growing up and seeing drug movies, movies like Trainspotting or Drugstore Cowboy, and seeing both the movie and reading the book of The Basketball Diaries, and being very fascinated and taken by not just drugs but also the experience of addiction at a very young age — which was before I’d even taken a sip of alcohol. What’s kind of strange about that — and the addiction memoir in general — is that we assume that people are going to be able to sit down and write an in-depth, moment-by-moment replay of some night that happened 15 years ago while on day 7 of a crystal meth bender and assume that it’s going to be completely accurate, and I just don’t think that that’s possible. Also… I think that part of what it is to be a writer and a fiction writer is to be able to recreate experiences authentically. That’s what I wanted to play around with and see if I could do.
NP: I don’t even know if a Drugstore Cowboy would get made in today’s very sanitized society. For some reason the religious right seem to be dictating what’s acceptable for Hollywood to spit out.
LM: I suppose now we have vampires as a metaphor for both drugs and sex.
NP: Then there is also this double standard too that we expect our artists to be fucked up in some way, and if they’re not, we consider them less of an artist.
LM: Exactly… That was exactly the key point of the book. I think especially now, not just in Hollywood but also in this culture of the personal essay and the people getting paid to write personal essays for blogs and this and that, we see this thing where young people are going out and trying to live these dangerous experiences with the intention of coming back and writing about them at the end. I think it’s a very strange thing to ask from people and it’s also a very strange way to have an experience — if you’re 50 percent having it and 50 percent taking notes about how it’s going to turn into a story.
NP: Especially because so much of Hollywood business is actually done at AA and NA meetings. I know people in Hollywood that fake addictions so they can go do business at these meetings.
LM: My god, yeah, I actually know some people that have done the same thing. It’s just the lowest of the low.
NP: And, like, I don’t have these addiction issues and I often think that if I faked them, I could probably add a zero to my salary and my self-worth (as Hollywood perceives it).
LM: Absolutely. So, at that point, you’re like, what’s the difference between being able to authentically fake it and having had these experiences for real?
NP: It’s very much like the writer that faked being a 19-year old progeny when she was 32 or whatever. You have to give Hollywood what they want to some extent and you have to sell Hollywood the myth. Ironically enough, you have to sell the myth-makers the myth.
LM: Yes. [laughs] Right. It’s almost impossible to just present yourself as a person who is able to imagine these experiences. And the other interesting thing is, so much of what I think even people who have lived through this, there’s a narrative that’s expected and that comes from Hollywood itself. You see people living out the same narrative time after time, and then kind of recycling that. I don’t know, it’s all very much a mess. [laughs]
NP: Yourself and the novel bleed into each other, where would you say your personal experience ends and the character begins? Page 32?
LM: I would say that factually, some of it is true, not most of it, and that emotionally, the majority of it is true — if that makes any sense.
NP: Absolutely.
LM: I wrote a character to be very similar to me in a lot of ways and at the same time, they’re very… I think one of the funniest things about people thinking that this is real is that this is a character who starts in high school and she’s a very successful writer at a very young age. It’s very funny to me that this is so clearly an idealized version. That’s the thing for me that I wanted to be like, no, that did not happen. Like, I was not a successful playwright at the age of 15. I don’t know, that’s really funny.
But I’ve definitely drawn on a lot of real experiences. I mean, I have been sober for the last three and a half years, which is when I was writing the book. So, that’s real. Those are real things that I was thinking about and dealing with, but the vast majority of it is completely fictionalized. I will say that some of it comes from having talked to other people, and hearing their stories. It isn’t like, as you were saying, the first however many pages were real and then I kind of exploded it. It was that it was always a little bit of a fictionalized character.
NP: How much of the drug experience is yours? Did you do heroin for example?
LM: Now, this is the part where I’m like…how much do I actually reveal. I will say that, I have done some of the drugs and not all of the drugs. I haven’t done the harder [ones], like I haven’t done heroin… That was part of it for me, I was curious to see if I could recreate that experience and describe it authentically without having done it. I actually ran it by some people who have done a bunch of heroin and they bought it, which was kind of cool. But, for me, the feelings of needing to escape and needing more of it, and also, I think for me, the drugs that made you more productive, were always ones that I liked better…
NP: I have to admit, I’m jealous of the ones that made you productive. I was looking at your Hit Fix writing and you did 782 stories in less than a year! I’m like, damn, that’s some productivity there.
LM: I was sitting in an office pumping that out. That’s funny. I also don’t think of myself as a particularly fast writer, so part of it is creating this character and giving her these qualities I wish I had and envy. I wish I were a little faster and more productive.
NP: The mythical desert society — your description of that made me want to visit it. What’s that based on?
LM: That is definitely inspired by this weird thing that is happening, particularly in LA, of Coachella as a lifestyle… I think it started off being very much around the time of Coachella — every single person would just change their personality completely and they would wear an entirely new wardrobe for about a month and buy stuff from the Coachella line and just become this self-described free spirit. And I think that’s something now that’s lasting for an entire season. To me, there’s just something kind of strange about it. It’s almost cultish to me. It’s almost cultish, the idea of freedom as something that is a limited time, pay-a-premium-for experience, where you buy your VIP tickets and then you buy your new wardrobe and you drive out to the desert and you get to spend some time feeling free and photo documenting every second of it. It’s just very bizarre to me. And, it does feel a lot like a version of, in a very extreme way, it’s like what the Manson family looked like out on Spahn Ranch. A bunch of women in hippy clothes, trying to live free — and that didn’t end super well. So I wanted to create a really extreme version of the Coachella cult and see what that would look like.
NP: You have a SuicideGirls reference in there…
LM: Totally! I remembered that just yesterday. I was like, oh man, that’s so ridiculous. Yes, I do… She was not a Suicide Girl, but I gave her a Suicide Girl name. It was Burnt Sienna. I think that’s an awesome Suicide Girl name.
NP: That is an absolutely awesome Suicide Girl name.
LM: Isn’t it? It’s just cool. [laughs]
NP: In your writing you have a love/hate relationship with tattoos. You wrote a hot scene where you were in the throws of sex with a dude and you thought about the tattoo you were happy that you didn’t have on your back at that moment. (“Ben was behind me, pushing his palms against the section of my back I’m so very happy I never got tattooed.”)
LM: Yeah, I mean, I have a bunch of tattoos. My favorite one I think is my most recent one and it’s really awesome. Great line work. [It’s a] little piece of a capybara on my arm, which is like the best animal! But yeah, I’m a big fan of tattoos, at the same time… I guess I have a tattoo that’s really more of like a branding mark… Again, just thinking about it now, I realize it plays into this whole idea of like, what will you pay for freedom or to belong to this fringe we-are-doing-our-own-thing cult? And then this situation ended up being like a lot of pain.
NP: In the book, the branding was where your character definitely hit a limit.
LM: Yes. She was like, that’s it, I’m done. I have this horribly painful, weird fringe cult tattoo on my back and now I’m getting out of here. Yeah. But for me… I think I have five or six tattoos… I love that I can just look down and see that this is that period of my life, this is when I was feeling that. I guess I wonder now… that would be kind of amazing if I could go show people my fringe cult branding tattoo. Now I’m going to go out and get one so I can tell people about it.
NP: You seem to be one of the few people that loves Twitter more than me.
LM: Oh my god…
NP: Which is a rare thing. When and why did you first get sucked in?
LM: Yeah… I do love it. Love / hate, but very much love. I started pretty early… when I was just fresh out of college and I started blogging, just kind of on my own. I turned to Twitter and I found really instantly this really great community of Twitter comedians and people just using it to make jokes. For me, it ended up really helping me learn how to craft a joke in a way where there was instant feedback. I wanted to do a good job because I wanted to impress people. I think that was actually a really instrumental part of, as a comedy writer, me getting better at that… I think it definitely really helped me. It has been a big help to my career, honestly. To have been on early and to have built up a good presence there has been actually really helpful and something I’m grateful for... Now, I’m like, oh, I follow too many people and I can’t keep up. But there was a period where it was really just this constant stream of amazing jokes and amazing links and this and that, and I felt like I was contributing to it, which was pretty cool.
NP: I enjoyed the top ten tweet lists that you did for Hit Fix. But then the OCD Twitter-addict in me kicked in and I’m like, how does she know that they’re the ten best tweets? Has she gone through all the tweets? Because I’m the kind of person that would go through every fuckin’ tweet that anyone has ever tweeted, just because I’m that OCD.
LM: It helps to have a daily post count where you’re like, I have to do eight things today, I’m just going to lie and say that these are definitively the ten best.
NP: I love that you selected Dana Gould, because I’m a huge fan.
LM: He’s so funny.
NP: Have you met him?
LM: I have, yes. He’s wonderful.
NP: What’s next for you?
LM: Right now, I’m very much just trying to take time to really enjoy this and do it right. But I’m also working on a couple of pilots and talking possible adaptation. Then I do have another book in my head that eventually I will sit down and get started on. But I kind of need to build up the… I need to spook myself back into it. I don’t think I’m quite ready to sit down and spend another three years working on something.
NP: And you need to get another prescription for Adderall…
LM: Exactly! [laughs] But, for now, it’s probably just like a lot of tweeting.
South on Highland: A Novel by Liana Maeby is available via Amazon.com now!
Photography by Lee Grohl.
